We assume you have already adapted your Linux console and X11 configuration
to your keyboard and locale. This is explained in the Danish/International
HOWTO, and in the other national HOWTOs: Finnish, French, German, Italian,
Polish, Slovenian, Spanish, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese, Thai, Esperanto. But
please do not follow the advice given in the Thai HOWTO, to pretend you
were using ISO-8859-1 characters (U0000..U00FF) when what you are typing
are actually Thai characters (U0E01..U0E5B). Doing so will only cause
problems when you switch to Unicode.

Don't hesitate to install Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese etc. fonts. Even
if they are not Unicode fonts, they will help in displaying Unicode
documents: at least Netscape Communicator 4 and Java will make use of
foreign fonts when available.

The following programs are useful when installing fonts:

"mkfontdir directory"
prepares a font directory for use by the X server, needs to be executed
after installing fonts in a directory.

The ones contained in XFree86, sometimes packaged in separate packages.
For example, SuSE has only normal 75dpi fonts in the base `xf86' package.
The other fonts are in the packages `xfnt100', `xfntbig', `xfntcyr',
`xfntscl'.

Applications wishing to display text belonging to different scripts (like
Cyrillic and Greek) at the same time, can do so by using different X fonts
for the various pieces of text. This is what Netscape Communicator and Java
do. However, this approach is more complicated, because instead of working
with `Font' and `XFontStruct', the programmer has to deal with `XFontSet',
and also because not all fonts in the font set need to have the same
dimensions.

Markus Kuhn has assembled fixed-width 75dpi fonts with Unicode encoding
covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew scripts and
many symbols.
They cover ISO 8859 parts 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,13,14,15,16 all at once.
These fonts are required for running xterm in utf-8 mode. They are now
contained in XFree86 4.0.1, therefore you need to install them manually
only if you have an older XFree86 3.x version.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz.

Roman Czyborra has assembled an 8x16 / 16x16 75dpi font with Unicode encoding
covering a huge part of Unicode. Download unifont.hex.gz and hex2bdf from
http://czyborra.com/unifont/.
It is not fixed-width: 8 pixels wide for European characters, 16 pixels wide
for Chinese characters. Installation instructions:

xterm is part of X11R6 and XFree86, but is maintained separately by Tom
Dickey.
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey/xterm/xterm.html
Newer versions (patch level 146 and above) contain support for converting
keystrokes to UTF-8 before sending them to the application running in the
xterm, and for displaying Unicode characters that the application outputs
as UTF-8 byte sequence. It also contains support for double-wide characters
(mostly CJK ideographs) and combining characters, contributed by Robert Brady
<robert@suse.co.uk>.

Configure it by calling "./configure --enable-wide-chars ...", then
compile and install it.

Have a Unicode fixed-width font installed. Markus Kuhn's ucs-fonts.tar.gz
(see above) is made for this.

Start "xterm -u8 -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'".
The option "-u8" turns on Unicode and UTF-8 handling. The font designated
by the long "-fn" option is Markus Kuhn's Unicode font. Without this option,
the default font called "fixed" would be used, an ISO-8859-1 6x13 font.

Take a look at the sample files contained in Markus Kuhn's ucs-fonts
package:

$ cd .../ucs-fonts
$ cat quickbrown.txt
$ cat utf-8-demo.txt

You should be seeing (among others) greek and russian characters.

To make xterm come up with UTF-8 handling each time it is started,
add the lines

The fonts mentioned above are fixed size and not scalable. For some
applications, especially printing, high resolution fonts are necessary,
though. The most important type of scalable, high resolution fonts are
TrueType fonts.
They are currently supported by

A small program which tests whether a Linux console or xterm is in UTF-8 mode
can be found in the
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/keyboards/x-lt-1.24.tar.gz
package by Ricardas Cepas, files testUTF-8.c and testUTF8.c. Most applications
should not use this, however: they should look at the environment variables,
see section "Locale environment variables".